[PLUG] internet buffer bloat

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Tue Sep 6 17:17:10 UTC 2016


>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Barry <bill at billbarry.org> writes:

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Galen Seitz <galens at seitzassoc.com> wrote:

Galen> Here's fascinating blog post by Jim Gettys, one of the creators
Galen> of the X Window System, and a Bell Labs employee.  In it he
Galen> describes how the internet is being crippled by excessive
Galen> buffering.
Galen> https://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-
Galen> glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/

Galen> Here's the corresponding LWN article.
Galen> http://lwn.net/Articles/418918/#Comments

Bill> Some good work has been done since this article came out.  Version
Bill> 15 of openwrt has available a couple of packages which implement a
Bill> system called Smart Queue Management that does a good job of
Bill> mitigating bufferbloat.  The packages are sqm-scripts and a
Bill> corresponding luci-app-sqm.

Bill> Here is a page about installing and tuning them.
Bill> https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/sqm

Bill> There is even a youtube video showing the installation procedure.
Bill> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvYhifdQ92Q

CoDel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel) has been the standard
network scheduler in OpenWrt/LEDE for a few years.  It was introduced
into OpenWrt in May 2012 and made fq_codel the default queue discipline
in April 2013, at least in trunk (I don't use standard releases, so I'm
not sure when those changed).  You should get it out-of-the-box for any
release later than that.

As a result (as well as improved behavior of client software), we
generally don't see any problems with bittorrent at Personal Telco nodes
anymore.  There was a time when I needed to intervene occasionally "to
protect the network" from bad behavior (mostly upstream bandwidth
saturation and queue filling), but I haven't needed to for so long I've
almost forgotten how.  We do still discourage bittorrent on public
networks, but I'm not sure it's really necessary anymore.

Gettys was at a Community Wireless Summit I attended in Barcelona in
2012, and gave a talk about it.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net



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